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I have been playing with our Raspberry Pi for a few weeks using it for a media centre utilising Raspbmc.

It’s is a bit slow loading (even with a Class 10 SD card) it, and its rather flaky free Android remote control actually do the job for pennies.

It does work out of the box, but some elements just don’t want to play nice, like importing media info or connection to the Synology NAS using credential or via NFS.

In the longer term I will either re-purpose some old PC hardware or more likely build a fan-less SFF PC based system and stream to the entire house from there, but for now it’s quicker than playing my laptop in…

Well, I’m one of the 600,000 applicants to the World of Warplanes Alpha and I was a Beta tester for World of Tanks, so perhaps i need to be buying a joystick after all…

Wargaming.net is proud to announce that the Closed Beta Test of the company’s highly anticipated game World of Warplanes will take off on May 31 this year.

Since its Global Alpha launch on February 23, World of Warplanes has secured more than 600,000 applications, with 100,000 received within the first 24 hours. Thousands of players have been granted access to World of Warplanes alpha version, and the army of test pilots will be increased drastically once the game enters Closed Beta.

We would like to stress that all those players who have applied but have not been yet accepted to Global Alpha will have a priority for Closed Beta.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the game and have had no problems with DX11 as my ancient GForce only supports DirectX 10.1. That said, I have experienced the crashing when hitting the start button which they have just patched and fixed. I’m still suffering sound glitches in cutscenes as they are being rendered by my equally ancient CPU, instead of the GPU.

Still, the game is a blast, the puzzles are cool and figuring out how to tackle them is still taking some head scratching…

If you have something shiny and new, you might want to see if the new patch makes your DX11 card work as intended now (they don’t)…

I have moved on to making minor changes to other people’s skins to creating my own.

You need to install Rainmeter’s current beta which can be found here and then grab the rmskin files as approriate, my main theme is called Cobalt shown on the left and you can download from here.

To launch the various elements Right click on the Rainmeter Icon in the tray bar and select Configs > Cobalt > [Name of element i.e. Digital clock] > Clock.ini

The 5 elements you can use are digital clock, analogue clock, Weather, system monitor, media player (remote control) that supports WMP, Winamp, iTunes, Foobar, Spotify and AIMP, If you don’t use Winamp, then you will need to edit the skin – instructions are in the ini file. All of them can be altered by right clicking and selecting edit skin.

The BarClock is a separate download, again you need the current Rainmeter beta and then simply download & it will install this clock and as you can see, hovering the mouse gives a easy to read numeric value…